Burning Man 2014: French Quarter an oasis for gourmands

Black Rock Desert, Nev. >> Don’t let the name fool you; the people behind the Black Rock French Quarter aren’t French, and they’re not from Louisiana, even if their two-story facade near the center of Burning Man is supposed to look like it was airlifted from New Orleans.

The French Quarter is a collaboration of more than half a dozen theme camps and is one of the largest Southern California-based projects at Burning Man, the annual outdoor art festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.

Motley teams of Hollywood set builders, interior designers, metal fabricators and chefs build most of the structural elements in Los Angeles and store it more than 130 miles east in Joshua Tree.

During the festival, about 250 people come from as far away as central Australia to create immersive experiences centered around eating, drinking and living well in Black Rock City, the name given to the ephemeral village in the desert that swells to more than 70,000 people during Burning Man, which continues through Monday.

In a desert wasteland populated by sweaty hooligans, blinding dust storms and ripe Porta Potty stalls, the French Quarter is an oasis for the bon vivant — or any Burner that is tired of eating canned beans and beef jerky.

There are camps that roast and serve coffee, bake breads and pastries, brew beer, serve gumbo, properly store expensive wines, host a morning farmers market and offer massage and bodywork as well as baths with homemade soaps and bath salts.

All of these goods and services are free, as Burning Man has a strict policy against the exchange of money.

“It’s not a barter economy or a gift economy, it’s a sharing economy,” says French Quarter founder Ari Schindler. “We never expect anything in return. It’s not a quid pro quo, but it’s not a space where you walk in and expect people to give you food. It’s about participating.”

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The nuance is subtle, but it’s an important one for newbies to Burning Man — affectionately dubbed “birgins” — to understand.

In the Broken Angel Bathhouse room, for example, the free bath salts aren’t given out willy-nilly like tortellini samples at Costco. Each person receives a different mix of bath salt varieties depending on their unique spiritual aura, and matching aura with the correct salts involves a pseudoscientific assessment.

“I need you to close your eyes and fill your head with the dirtiest, perverted thoughts you can imagine,” says Ashley Finger, one of the Broken Angel mixologists.

She taps a tuning fork and swirls it around a bemused guest’s face, then shakes a maraca in her ear.

“Now open your eyes,” Finger says, while scrutinizing the girl’s face with a diamond-cutter’s monocle. “Oh yeah, you are dirty! I’ve got just the thing for you.”

Next door, at the French Quarter tap room, Northern California nanobrewer Michael Enos is filling people’s cups with his Bat Ray IPA, one of two beers he has on tap this year.

“It’s not like Budweiser or Pabst,” Enos said. “This is some high-quality stuff.”

The French Quarter also has a space for oenophiles, wine connoisseurs who bring nice wine to the desert and need a place to cool it, as well as space for wine-makers, who bring in their own vintages each year for people to taste.

“Instead of creating a camp for wine snobs, I created a camp that provides wine and brings wine people together,” Schindler says.

The French Quarter is an outgrowth of the Golden Cafe, a gypsy cafe and bar Schindler founded more than 10 years ago and continues to operate next to the French Quarter. The cafe is housed inside a dome tent filled with French bistro tables and chairs. A steam-punky bar fixes fancy cocktails and serves them in glassware — a rarity at Burning Man, as everyone is expected to carry a cup or mug with them wherever they go.

Just don’t ask for water.

“If you ask for a drink, that’s fine; it’s a gift,” Schindler says. “But if you ask for a water, you’re a burden to the community. You’re supposed to be self-sufficient!”

Scantily clad bodies, all-night dance parties and breathtaking works of interactive art are some of the more obvious thrills offered at Burning Man, but for those who choose to “participate radically,” as they say here, Burning Man allows you to become someone you’re not — or rather someone you’d like to be.

“As a kid, you pretend. At Burning Man, you kind of pretend, but you kind of do it, too,” Schindler says. “If you want to be a restaurateur, you can do it.”

Like many Burners, Schindler has a background in tech, but he always thought it would be fun to run a bar, which is how the Golden Cafe started.

Schindler now operates a bar in North Hollywood called The Other Door and a catering service called Scarlette, which provides Burning Man-like bar services for parties and special events.

“Burning Man really showed me how there was this whole world of opportunity of things that I could do,” Schindler says. “Starlette is entirely an outgrowth of what I was doing at Burning Man. It just turns out that there was a demand for it in the real world.”